On March 2, 2014, I had the honor of performing my first marriage ceremony. There is a relative paucity of resources for self-conscious atheists and humanists eager for help in planning weddings that reflect their values, break with religious forms they conscientiously object to, and yet also feel in keeping enough with existing traditions to feel [Read More...]

A lot of people say that of course they believe in equality for women, but they oppose feminism. Or they say that they’re not a feminist, they’re a humanist. So why should humanists and egalitarians also be feminists? Why isn’t being a feminist superfluous to egalitarianism and humanism or, even worse, somehow anti-humanist or anti-egalitarian? Let’s start [Read More...]

There’s a pretty good article in The Atlantic about the Navy’s recent rejection of Jason Heap’s application to become the U.S. military’s first humanist chaplain. At least the stated reason he was rejected didn’t involve reference to his lack of belief in God. The Navy just said it was “a very competitive process”. The other [Read More...]

It turns out that I really am a Humanist. Many in the atheist community assume (or talk in ways that seem to assume) that there is simply a necessary connection between atheism and Humanism. But this assumption was far from obvious to me when I first became an atheist. I was reading Nietzsche and his [Read More...]